Michal Wojcik's Blog, page 5

Inktober 2019

I did Inktober this year. Noticeable improvements from the last time I did this in 2017: better use of volumes, more expressive and varied characters, more unusual and interesting compositions. Using just one sketchbook helped; my art supplies are better,my use of them more controlled.

Thumbnailing was important, as last time. Every day, I became a little more ambitious and had to try out sketch after sketch before hitting on the exact right feel. Each day, the drawing took longer to complete. I...

Then the winged hussars arrived!

I have a short story in the latest Tesseracts anthology. It’s about the Polish winged hussars, the best-dressed cavalry force of the seventeenth century.

You can get Tesseracts Twenty-Two: Alchemy and Artifacts from Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, Kobo, Barnes & Noble and Google Play.

A second pilgrimage

The Scott Pilgrim series (2004 – 2010) is one of the most influential things to come out of Canadian comics. It captures the thrust of new artistic movements in the medium and storytelling modes in the first decade of the millennium. Bryan Lee O’Malley draws on video games and manga for its form – the six volumes are all made to imitate Japanese comic releases from the size to the panel formatting – while still retaining a unique look that distinguishes it from its inspirations.

Scott Pilgrim is stylish...

Woods so deep and strange

Charles De Lint is highly prolific and has explored a wide range of styles, but Moonheart (1984)set the dominant flavour for his work. When you think of the name Charles De Lint, you think of a very specific kind of urban fantasy.

That high output and dominant flavour has its advantages and disadvantages. As a skilled wordsmith, if you like his prose style or his revisited settings, boy you’re in for a lot of it. But the atmosphere and intensity bounces to wildly varying degrees: from the light-hea...

Becalmed Ohmu

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Ink and watercolour. Illustration from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki.

Memory in the City of Women

My experience with novels that have multiple authors is always coloured by wondering what part belongs to whom, and how things would have shaken out under just one pen or another. Often, the voices of the people involved dampen each other instead of sharpening their quirks and thematic obsessions, such that I come away feeling something is missing from the collaboration.

The Steel Seraglio (2012)has three authors, but I didn’t encounter any of those difficulties as I read it. Mike Carey, Lin...

Robot philosophy

1.

It’s hard to imagine the kind of circumstances and types of people that spurred on the intellectual achievements of classical Greece. While we admire Greek philosophers, the issues they discussed don’t come up all that often outside university campuses and late-night conversations. In modern life, philosophy has taken on a much smaller role in steering society, and we don’t tie together a broad range of activities like art, literature, biology, technology and the like under the same umbre...

The Madness of Solomon Kane

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A scene from “Wings in the Night” by Robert E. Howard.

WordPress.com makes it a bit of a pain to share artwork – it’s just not what this platoform was built for. If you want to follow that side of my creative output, you can find me posting drawings and paintings much more frequently on DeviantArt, Instagram, and most recently, mastodon.art.

Quick review: Phantomland

Phantomland by Maaria Laurinen perfectly captures the experience of being tossed into a new job head-first and feeling completely out of their depth. Notwithstanding that in this case, the job is joining an elite law enforcement unit that appears to only employ people who have already died.

This is a webcomic that clearly takes inspiration from the “big coat” fashion of Fullmetal Alchemist – just look at these jackets!

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Yet that influence isn’t just aesthetic; it manifests in the impeccable...

Immigrant anxieties

I’ve noticed a growing swell of first- and second-generation immigrant writers of fantasy expressing anxiety over drawing on their family’s culture for their work, or the consequences they face when they don’t.

The fears are the same: getting criticism for lack of authenticity – not being a “real” member of that culture – or getting pigeonholed and then ostracized for not reflecting the dominant narrative of “the immigrant.” These fears reflect our own destabilized experiences as liminal cult...